Studies with impossible languages falsify LMs as models of human language
November 14, 2025 ยท Declared Dead ยท ๐ arXiv.org
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Authors
Jeffrey S. Bowers, Jeff Mitchell
arXiv ID
2511.11389
Category
cs.CL: Computation & Language
Citations
0
Venue
arXiv.org
Last Checked
6 months ago
Abstract
According to Futrell and Mahowald [arXiv:2501.17047], both infants and language models (LMs) find attested languages easier to learn than impossible languages that have unnatural structures. We review the literature and show that LMs often learn attested and many impossible languages equally well. Difficult to learn impossible languages are simply more complex (or random). LMs are missing human inductive biases that support language acquisition.
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